WEDGWOOD SOCIETY THINKS BIG

Jon Anderson, Tribune Staff WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

A sense of Old English restraint is one of the hallmarks of the Wedgwood Society of Chicago. They got around to holding their first meeting of the new year last week over cocktails and dinner at the Tavern Club, a private retreat at 333 N. Michigan Ave.

Slowly, over the years, the members have been raising money to build an arts center and museum to pay tribute to people they call "Illustrious Moderns."

The project appears to be in no danger of completion.

But the group has, without doubt, the classiest letterhead in town.

At the top is Queen Elizabeth II, followed by 64 others, including Princess Grace of Monaco, Sir Winston Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Clare Booth Luce, A.N. Pritzker and Jane Byrne. At the bottom: Lord Piers Wedgwood, a descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, an English potter (1730-1795) whose dream, he once said, was to be "Vasemaker to the Universe."

Josiah Wedgwood was also "the father of modern marketing," arguably the first person to understand fully the value of celebrity clients in positioning a mass-market brand name, as Sotheby's ceramic specialist Letitia Roberts has observed in writings on the subject.

In 1773, for example, one notable client, Catherine the Great of Russia, ordered a 952-piece dinner service to entertain guests at Chesmenski Palace, located near a frog swamp. Going all out, Wedgwood put a different frog, along with British castles and landscapes, on each hand-painted plate, bowl and cup, for 1,244 views in all.

The "Frog Service," as it quickly became known, was the talk of Europe.

Later, as Roberts notes, Wedgwood learned how to produce lower-priced crockery for the masses, allowing their guests to flip plates, check the label and feel special.

Last week, as five dozen members of the Wedgwood Society of Chicago, most of them wealthy locals, settled into an upstairs function room at the Tavern Club, a sense of wistful Anglophilia filled the air. It was not for the Britain of Tony Blair.

Rather, as several guests noted, it was a feeling brought about by faded memories of leather book bindings, tar soaps, old tweeds and bumpy plates, the kind of aged artifacts that once led sociologist Thorstein Veblen to speculate on "the leisure class' veneration of the archaic" as a way of separating from the lower orders who fly to the new.

The host at the meeting of the Wedgwood/Chicago was Lawrence Marshall Pucci, who, with his sister, Caryl Pucci Rettaliata, established the society in 1967.

Their father, Lawrence Rance Pucci, started the family's tailoring business on North Michigan Avenue in 1923 and, as the younger Pucci explains, "was obsessed with Wedgwood china." Along with collecting, the senior Pucci made his children aware of "Illustrious Moderns," a term coined more than 200 years ago by Josiah Wedgwood as he did plaques and busts of those he called "outstanding statesmen, scientists and contributors of the age."

In 1972, the Chicago society started up a list of its own, to honor the "gentlemen and ladies who've enhanced the art and culture of this age," as the younger Pucci put it.

For example, when Princess Margaret came through town in 1980, she was added at a Wedgwood ceremony, even though she tangled, that same week, with another "Illustrious Modern," then-mayor Jane Byrne, over the topic of Irish contributions to world culture.

Picked as this year's "Illustrious Modern" was Dominique de Menil, a French-born, Houston-based heiress to a fortune built by her father, Conrad Schlumberger, who developed a geophysical tool that determined the location of underground oil deposits.

Mrs. de Menil was best known for building what architect Philip Johnson called "the greatest private museum in the world," the Menil Collection Museum near Houston, housing more than 15,000 works of art valued at upwards of $150 million. Mrs. de Menil died last New Year's Eve.

Pucci presented a plaque honoring her to two of her friends, Count Rinaldo Petrini de Montfort, an Italian-born architect now based near Houston, and Carolyn Farb, a Houston socialite and author of "How to Raise Millions: A Guide to Fundraising."

Both promised to help with Chicago efforts to get the local "Illustrious Moderns" museum beyond the talking stage.

"Carolyn's just a whiz at raising money," whispered one guest as the evening came to a close. "One time, she pulled in $1 million in one night, with a ball and silent auction."